This is an excellent post by my buddy, Rod, and the accompanying comments are also well worth reading.

But this kind of nonsense makes me want to send my son to TAC instead of Notre Dame (where I am confident there is little to no support for proabortion political candidates on campus).

The May issue of The New Criterion is concerned with education — mostly of the “higher” variety. Contributors include Roger Kimball, Alan Charles Kors, Robert Paquette, Victor Davis Hanson, James Piereson, and Charles Murray.

* The front page of today’s USA Today announces, “Value of college tuition is called into question”

* NEH deputy chairman Thomas Lindsay recently suggested six “core questions” about America “that all [college] students should examine.”

* This study shows that a reorientation of the collegiate core curriculum cannot come too soon.

* Harvard has acquired the “papers” of Norman Mailer’s mistress.

* Two web journals launched during SA’s hiatus that you’ll want to bookmark: Minding the Campus from the Manhattan Institute (a great blogroll and links list), and First Principles from ISI.

If you missed the Society’s recent (March) student confab in Ann Arbor (theme: “The People and the Courts”), fear not!  You can now watch (or just listen) to the whole enchilada online, here.   The full agenda is below the fold: (more…)

It’s gotta be a laff riot, right?  As well as a display of the subtle wit and wistful humanity we’ve all come to expect from the higher ed industry with regard to the Bush Presidency. 

Click here for some of the entries (don’t miss the 5-minute video).  Pick your own favorite, then go below the fold to see who won. (more…)

The always-interesting John McWhorter praises the documentary, and offers his personal experience of PC at UC Berkeley.

He will speak on the topic, “Is Corporate Law Still a Race to the Top?”, at Case Western from 4:30 to 5:30 ET.  You can watch it live here; at some point in the future it will be available on demand from this site, as well.

In a blog-entry entitled, “Protest at SMU Targets Bush Library,” Paul Burka of Texas Monthly writes:

The likelihood that the George W. Bush presidential library will be located at SMU has not been welcome news for at least one segment of the university community. A letter, dated December 16, from “Faculty, Administrators, & Staff” of the Perkins School of Theology to R. Gerald Turner, president of the Board of Trustees, is now circulating not only on the SMU campus but also among a wider academic community, urging the board to “reconsider and to rescind SMU’s pursuit of the presidential library.”

Texas Monthly acquired a copy of the letter, about which Mr. Burka writes extensively in his blog entry here.

In the interest of full disclosure, Baylor University, my employer, is a finalist, along with SMU and the University of Dallas, for the George W. Bush Presidential Library. As SA readers would suspect, unlike my peers at SMU, I would welcome the Bush Library at my own institution.

Update: It looks like two SMU professors recently published in the United Methodist Nexus an essay, “The George W. Bush Library: Asset or Albatross for SMU?,” in which they voice their opposition to the prospect of their institution acquiring the library. I’m not sure whether the letter about which Burka has written had its origin in this essay.

Update II: I found a copy of the letter, which is entitled, “In Protest of the George Bush Presidential Library: An Open Letter to the President & Trustees of Southern Methodist University.“

That is the new title of my forthcoming book that will be published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press. It just appeared on Amazon.com here. According to the Leiter Law Rankings, Cambridge is one of the six leading academic presses. It is ranked number one by political scientists and is considered one of the top two publishers in philosophy. Because this book overlaps the fields of law, political science, and philosophy, I am deeply gratified with the forthcoming publication of this book.

If any of SA’s readers are interested in participating, you can do so here.

SA blogger William J. Watkins Jr.’s book, “Reclaiming the American Revolution: The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and their legacy,” is reviewed by Soraya Rudofsky in the latest installment of the Federalist Society’s most excellent publication, Engage.

Readers of my work here and elsewhere know that I’m interested in the development of Christian higher education. There are heroes in that endeavor that include George Marsden, Mark Noll, and others. I had the good fortune to get to know Robert Sloan who put a vision of distinctive Christian higher ed in place at Baylor and engendered heavy controversy in the process. I continue to follow his work at a new school. Here is a worthwhile slice of his inaugural speech last week: (more…)

then I’d say the ivy hanging on its campus walls is most likely the kind that will give you a nasty rash.

I wasn’t able to attend Robert Sloan’s inauguration as president of Houston Baptist, but an observer told me there were a thousand people in attendance. I was shocked. Houston Baptist is currently a small school. A thousand people for an event like this is huge.

Sloan and Houston megachurch pastor Ed Young (the elder, not his son who is also well-known) both delivered powerful addresses about the need for vital Christian higher education. I’m going to try to get those transcripts if they don’t appear on the HBU website pretty quickly.

For a guy living in Georgia and contributing to a website called Southern Appeal, I end up writing a lot about Texas!

Nevertheless, I know the sophisticated mix of Catholics and Evangelicals merrily perusing the daily commentary will be interested to know that today is the day Robert Sloan is inaugurated as president of Houston Baptist University.

Get ready for that school to massively increase its profile in the city during the next decade.  The resurgence of Christian higher education continues in the metropolis.

I’ve written about Baylor University for the websites of Christianity Today, National Review, and American Spectator. During the struggle for control of the university a couple of years back I interviewed several of the key players and eventually wound up working in the university relations department in addition to my graduate research work for Francis Beckwith and another prof. who dislikes publicity.

Because of my scholarly interest in a battle that was essentially defined by how one felt about Baylor’s stated goal of being simultaneously Christian and a comprehensive research university, I was asked to write a chapter for a book on the topic to be published by Baylor University Press. Contributors were drawn from both sides of the controversy. I was more favorable to the vision. Others were more opposed.

Since that time, I have heard that Baylor University Press would not publish the book because it was too controversial. That was okay because Baylor University would publish the book separately from its press. Then, I heard some contributors were making unhappy noises about the book, which was really hard to understand because they had written chapters for it. After hearing the administration would still publish the book and that copies had already been printed, I have now been informed the book will not be released.

The cherry on top of this unhappy story is that a former Baylor president (not Robert Sloan, who initiated the school’s vision and was forced to resign) has written a charged email threatening those responsible for the book. He mentions his skill in psychological warfare and his willingness to release damaging information that he has passed on to some mysterious third party. The threatening email has been widely distributed. It looks like he got his way because the book has been suppressed.

The object lesson may be that academic freedom is an untrustworthy virtue. Those who cried out against Robert Sloan and Baylor’s Christian vision regularly complained that the vision would circumscribe academic freedom and Baptist freedom. They don’t like a new book — a balanced book — and have now suppressed it. There are apparently copies lying around. Will they be burnt?

More to come if there is more . . .

The Macon Telegraph has this report.

Project Posner is the handiwork of former clerk Tim Wu, now on the Columbia Law faculty.  Here’s his explanation of the site:

The purpose of this site is to make freely and easily available to the public Richard Posner’s largest and greatest body of work — his judicial opinions. The database contains opinions from 1981 to 2006. It will not contain the most recent opinions.

Why this site? While Posner’s books and popular writings are easily available to the public, his opinions are difficult or expensive for the public to access, let alone search. This site, for the first time, collects almost all of his opinions in a single searchable and easily readable database.

For lawyers and those interested in law, Posner’s opinions have a particular substantive value. One thing that distinguishes the opinions is the effort to try and get at why a given law actually exists, and an effort to try and make sense of the law. That can make them more useful than most case reports.

In addition, the opinions often develop the American general and state common law. Posner is among the judges who feels free to take the rule of Erie as more suggestion than injunction.

Finally, some of the opinions are funny.

which they obviously haven’t learned.  For those of you who haven’t followed the riot, Phi Beta Con http://phibetacons.nationalreview.com/ provides the best coverage.  From the coverage, I see several possible claims by the speaker and the individuals sponsoring the event

1)  Assault against the individual students

2)  Battery against the individual students

3)  Intentional infliction of emotional distress against the individual students

4)  Assault against the clubs who directed the individual students

5)  Battery against the clubs who directed the individual students

6)  Intentional infliction of emotional distress against the clubs who directed the individual students.

7)  Negligence against Columbia for failing to provide security.

8)  Violations of 1st (14th) Amendment against Columbia for allowing a heckler’s veto of speech.

Sue the John and Joe Does and then obtain discovery to identify the individuals involved.  Give the University the students names and identities and see if they enforce the policies which prohibit the conduct involved.  If not, claim #9:

 9)  Violations of 1st (14th) Amendment against Columbia for failing viewpoint discrimination in disciplining (or rather not) discliplining students based on the viewpoint of the speech that the students disrupted. Breach of contract against the University for failing to comply with its contractual duty (through student handbook) to protect students and encourage free speech.

Update:  I misread the history of Columbia–it is apparently a private institution and not a state one, so no constitutional claims there.

Yesterday I linked to a video showing the response of liberal students at Columbia to a conservative speaker.  Last night Jane Fonda spoke at Notre Dame.  The conservative response:  To attend and submit written questions (as that was all that was allowed), which Fonda ignored if she didn’t feel like answering; and to distribute flyers at the doors with details on the real Jane Fonda.  Only one lone student interrupted, running into the auditorium and screaming Hanoi Jane.

go to Columbia where the heckler’s veto passes for intellectual debate.

As I’ve noted on more than one occasion, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute does vital work.  It recently launched two new websites well worth a look:

Civic Literacy Report features ISI’s recently-released report, The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education’s Failure to Teach America’s History and Institutions. It is based on a survey of 14,000 randomly selected college freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities across the country, who answered 60 multiple-choice questions.  The report concludes that 

• There is trivial difference between freshmen and seniors in their knowledge of America’s heritage.
• 16 of 50 schools surveyed exhibited negative learning.
• Overall, seniors failed the civic literacy exam with an average score of 53%.

You can read Pete DuPont’s Opinion Journal column describing and discussing the study by clicking here.

The Culture of Enterprise site showcases a new ISI initiative to encourage study and scholarship on the topic through an essay contest, book and article awards, and a book publishing program.  Here’s hoping this effort enjoys great success.  

To Dr. Francis Beckwith on receiving tenrure from Baylor.

Well done, Frank. You certainly deserve it.

Want the latest on the Francis Beckwith (formerly my grad advisor) tenure battle?

It’s all at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Yep, it’s a big story now.

This thing is growing into one very unhappy situation. It’s still under appeal at Baylor.

UPDATE: 

One of the prof’s quoted in the story, Stephen Evans, is a liberal democrat who I think may actually have voted for Howard Dean. He threatens resignation over the way Beckwith has been treated. Bless you, Prof. Evans.

By the way, you can check out Beckwith’s C.V. at his website.

The Hahvahd Crimson reports:

In a move unprecedented among the nation’s top private schools, Harvard College will scrap its early admission program next fall and put all its applicants on a single deadline, University officials said yesterday.

. . . .

[The unversity] decided to drop the program in large part because of concerns that early admission provides an unfair advantage to applicants from privileged backgrounds . . . .

Jettisoning early admission, Fitzsimmons said, is “certainly a win for students in the bottom quarter and bottom half of the income distribution.” Students from more affluent families often apply early to express special interest in a particular school, while students from lower socioeconomic levels frequently hold off for the regular admissions process in order to compare colleges’ financial aid offers.

Thoughts?

Update: Gabriel over at HOS applauds the decision and hopes others will follow suit.

Last week, I shared my analysis of a convocation speech given by Mercer University President William Underwood. In response to my critique, the infamous website “Baylor Fans” lit up with threats against me and my progress toward the Ph.D. “Baylor Fans” is well-known as the hangout of those faculty members and alumni who were strongly opposed to the presidency of Robert Sloan and his vision for the school.

Here is the posting from a frequent Baylor Fans commenter referring to himself as “Gowilde”:

vToday, 12:15 PM

gowilde   Join Date: Jun 2004 Posts: 6,959

Because HB continues to trash the university from which he longs to seek the Ph.D., maybe said institution should withhold the degree.I’ve known dissertation cmtes to take a long time reading and critiquing a dissertation project. And I’ve known some cmtes who fail such projects. Then, the doctoral candidate runs out of time, and–presto–no Ph.D. It’s too bad b/c HB should have taken his Ph.D. BEFORE he began attacking the very institution from which he seeks that degree. I guess Naymond Keathley reads BF. ———————————- Dear Naymond, Please take care of this problem. I’m certain that Dean Lyon will help. Thanks, gw (From the thread, “Why Should I Care About Hunter Baker?”)

I found this post very interesting, particularly since there are people who tell me that they are certain this “gowilde” person is a Baylor faculty member.  I suspect he should worry about throwing the names of Baylor administrators around (Keathley and Lyon) as though they were at his beck and call.

What is more interesting is that these people think this kind of threat would deter me. Still more interesting yet is the fact that this threat comes from the quarters of Baylor that have insisted longest and loudest upon the principles of Baptist soul liberty and academic freedom. I assume this means that those concepts only apply to those of us who share their views. Turns out these freedoms are straitjackets.

I offer you the final commencement speech Robert Sloan gave at Baylor University as he ended his presidency in 2005. Here is a segment:

Amid the sometimes awful and also sometimes awe-inspiring changes in geopolitical alignments, the world economy, and the products of science and technology witnessed by us all over the last several years, I warn you today of a disturbing trend in the socio-political environments of the world. If I am wrong, this warning will not do you any harm; if I am right, however, these words may prove helpful.

I am referring to the growing public intolerance of the historic, even ordinary, particularities of the Christian faith. Ironically, while we may also attest to wonderful, explosive works of God’s Spirit around the world in manifestations of conversion and much social transformation for good, and the expanded use of the mass media and the new technologies for propagating Christian views, there has also been simultaneously a clearly manifested social and often times legal and political pressure placed upon Christians either to conform to the dominant cultural views or, at the very least, to be silent. This growing social pressure is very real. Whether through the arts, the media, or the machinery of governments, the message is clear. People of faith, including if not even especially Christians, are being cast in the role of extremists and zealots. Ordinary Christian beliefs of our traditions long and even recent past are now described by some as hate speech.

To be sure, the church does not have a spotless record in terms of its treatment of the poor, the disenfranchised, and the needy. But where the church and individual Christians have contributed to the sins of racism and other forms of injustice, we have been unfaithful to our own heritage. While the hands of Christians are not clean, it seems that our long history of devotion to the poor and the needy, our good works in the world as manifested in the founding of schools, orphanages, hospitals, agencies, and even governments committed to freedom and human dignity are now being conveniently ignored, if not forgotten.

The growing cultural consensus is that matters of faith are perhaps acceptable as long as they remain internal and private; but Christians must learn, or so these dominant voices seem to suggest, that their theological views and ethical priorities are outmoded and are at best matters of merely subjective religious opinion. To be relevant, it is suggested, Christians must learn their place and be willing to assimilate their historic beliefs to the more socially acceptable values of the dominant cultural forces. On this reading, it is okay to be Christian as long as you have nothing pressing to say and are willing to concede that what you believe has no real social relevance. It is as if we are being told: go to your churches, sing your songs, pray, weep, read your scriptures, even raise your hands if you must, but do not act as if your religious experiences really matter in the world after you leave your private, ceremonial enclaves. Such religious exercises may provide interesting opportunities for the study of American folklore, but for God’s sake (excuse me, I meant to say for “goodness” sake), do not act as if what you believe is really true.

Put another way: if you must use religious language in public, then-unless you want to concede your status as an unwashed rube-wink and smile when you speak, so all will know that you know that religious talk is only a quaint reflection of the past, a cultural throwback to times when people were not nearly as sophisticated as we are today.

You may be thinking that I am over-dramatizing the situation, and I admit that I am not yet prepared to state these matters in apocalyptic proportions; nonetheless, the cultural shifts about which I speak are very real and can be amply documented. Once again: ordinary beliefs and practices among Christians which were widely regarded as intellectually and morally credible only twenty and thirty years ago are now being socially marginalized, routinely characterized as only the views of extremists.

So there is my warning. But if there is any validity to it, if there is a growing cultural intolerance directed toward people of faith, what does that mean to you as graduates of Baylor University in the year 2005? Herewith, then, my challenge.

Although I have up to this point described the loss of cultural support for a Christian worldview and the basic values that go with it in negative terms, this kind of cultural shift has, in fact, some advantages. The good news is that the loss of cultural Christianity and a merely socially supported faith means that people of faith will be driven back to their roots. We are forced to examine again the sources of our faith, the reasons for our faith, and the intellectual and ethical credibility of the beliefs that we hold. We will be forced either out of honesty to give up our faith, or to renew it not only intellectually and historically but also spiritually. In such an environment faith can be clarified, strengthened, and restated for a new generation. Without the culturally reinforcing influences of your environment, dear graduates, you will truly have to be as our Lord prayed that His followers should be, that is, “in the world, but not of the world.” You will have to remember that before the world rejected the faith that emanates from Jesus Christ, it rejected Him. He is, after all, the Crucified One.

You will learn to go through life counting it all joy when your faith encounters trials knowing that the testing of your faith increases endurance. You will have to reflect seriously upon what the Christians of Asia Minor were told nearly 2000 years ago, specifically, that they need not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among them, and that such troubles are the expected consequences of a life faithfully lived under Jesus Christ.

We will all have to learn again what our Lord meant when he said that His followers were to be “salt” and “light” in the world, for salt really is different from tasteless grit and light exists for the express purpose of dispelling the darkness. The history of the church truly is a history of faith lived out in a world hostile to the scandal of the Cross and to the particular confession, “Jesus Christ is Lord.”

I would suggest to you that this speech, and not the one I referenced last week from Mercer University, captures more correctly the situation of Christianity in the modern world.

Professor Joe Knippenberg of Oglethorpe University gets to the root of Georgetown’s decision to bar evangelical student ministries from participating as affiliate groups on campus:

There’s the root of Georgetown’s conflict with its erstwhile evangelical affiliates. It demands that everyone subscribe wholeheartedly to a thoroughgoingly pluralistic vision and suspects that the evangelicals don’t.

But that’s apparently not good enough for the authorities at Georgetown, who seem to want everyone to love pluralism with all their hearts, souls, and minds. Of course, if everyone affirms pluralism in this way, what you really end up with is a kind of deep uniformity, not genuine pluralism at all. Yes, there are differences, but everyone regards them as accidental and superficial, not worth shouting about, let alone (perish the thought!) fighting over.  

Mama’s don’t let your babies grow up to go to Mercer University. William Underwood became the interim president at Baylor University after Robert Sloan was forced to resign. The first thing he did was fire David Jeffrey (the Christianity Today/First Things favorite whom I once asked for his favorite novel and he replied, “In what language?”) as Provost, which was heady stuff for an interim executive.

After it became clear he wouldn’t get the Baylor gig on a permanent basis, Underwood accepted the top job at Mercer University in Macon. I missed his inaugural, but an unkind person emailed me his fall convocation address and frankly, it caused me to lose sleep, not because it disturbed my own embrace of the Christian faith, but because there were young people there to hear it.

Without my J.D. and Ph.D. work, I would have bought a lot of the bullhockey for sale in the speech.

Underwood opens with the usual story of the warfare between science and religion in which religion receives its comeuppance. Afterwards, good religionists can only hold their beliefs lightly. See, because that whole Galileo thing has shown up the ignorance of the church for all time.

I checked Underwood’s footnotes to the speech in which he credits a 2006 book that relies on A.D. White’s famous polemic against science from the late 19th century. Of course, let’s not trouble ourselves with the fact that reputable historians of science say the presentation of the relationship between science and religion as warfare is a dishonest one made for political advantage (See Ronald Numbers and David Lindberg on this score).

But Underwood isn’t a scholar, he’s a lawyer (sorry guys) and he’s presenting his client’s case, not the whole truth. How else do you make sense of his statement that the Galileo affair wasn’t resolved until 300 years later, when man walked on the moon? Good heavens, man, Copernicus preceded Galileo!

I look forward to a Christmas speech or a spring talk in which Underwood offers up the insights he’s gained from several evenings with The Da Vinci Code on the nightstand. Should be illuminating.

One more thing. Want to know who Jesus was according to Underwood? A “freethinker.” “Hmmmm. What’s the right expression here? Let me think. Son of God, Savior, I Am, freethinker. Definitely freethinker!”